Computer system design has recently progressed wherein a large amount of effort has been devoted to improving the ease of using computer systems. One aspect of computer utilization where this is especially evident is in the area of computer user interfaces. For example, the use of windows, icons and pull-down, pop-up, or tear-off menus greatly enhance the ease of using a computer system. For example, pull-down menus often contain commands which are logically grouped so that specific commands may be located and executed quickly. While application programmers strive to arrange pull-down menus in a logical and efficient manner, the specific organization of pull-down menus may not be desirable to many users. Furthermore, in addition to executing commands through pull-down menus, many application programs provide keyboard equivalents for executing certain commands. Since keyboard equivalents may differ from application program to application program, the keyboard equivalents provided by application programmers for one application may often confuse many users accustomed to executing another application program.
One computer system which makes extensive use of pull-down menus and keyboard equivalents is the Macintosh computer system manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. In the Macintosh operating system, a mechanism is provided wherein plurality of pull-down menus may be used at the operating system level or by application programs. In this system, each individual menu and each menu command is defined by embedded computer code which is compiled at the time of creating a program or whenever updating the computer operating system. In order to modify any menu in this system, the corresponding menu code must be rewritten and recompiled. Thus, it is essentially impossible for users to modify these menus while executing an application program or when using the system for even basic operations.
One popular application program which also makes extensive use of pull-down menus is the Macintosh version of the Microsoft Word word processing application program, available from Microsoft, Inc. Early versions of Microsoft Word provided some flexibility in configuring menus items and associated keyboard equivalents. Specifically, in early versions of Microsoft Word, users were provided with the option of either displaying or hiding items or commands in specific menus. However, it provided no mechanism to modify in which specific menu commands are displayed, to modify the mapping between keystrokes and command or menu items.
Furthermore, while various macro recorders for computer systems allow users to record specific actions such as selecting certain menu items or executing a specific series of keystrokes by invoking those actions with a keystroke, the use of macro recorders is limited to commands which appear on menus or dialog boxes and does not give full access to all commands available for use within application programs. At the same time, currently available macro recorders are not typically fully integrated within an application program, and functions implemented with macro recorders require several additional steps to initiate a desired function.
No computer system or application program user interface is known which allows a user to fully configure a plurality of menus wherein virtually any command available to a user may be assigned to any menu in the system and further wherein virtually any keystroke or sequence of keystrokes may be assigned to execute virtually any command without the need for exiting an application program currently in use. The present invention further provides a method and system for allowing users to create custom commands and assign those commands to any menu available in the system and assign virtually any keystroke or sequence of keystrokes for executing a user defined custom command.